As the mileage on a tire increases, the sidewall rubber surfaces often become dull and unattractive. This is due to various causes including wind, weather, sunlight, scratching, abrasion from dirt, and other chemical and physical reactions. Many products are available today on the market for tire dressing usage to address these adverse effects. Many of these tire dressing products restore older appearance from a dull, weathered appearance to a shiny, bright, and like-new condition. For example, conventionally a dispersion of the silicone fluids in petroleum distillates or a conventional oil in water silicone emulsion system with milky or opaque appearance are often used to restore the attractive, bright, shiny, and like-new appearance on the tire surface. Typically conventional tire dressing formulas for dressing and appearance applications tend to have limited adhesion to the rubber of the tire. Ideally, a product has the long-term performance characteristics of being resistant to car wash detergents and weathering, such as rain and storm. Unfortunately, conventional products remain difficult for a consumer to apply and do not provide the balance of desired properties. To-date, tire dressing products have involved a trade-off of properties with low viscosity film forming polymers tending to be vulnerable to weathering, sag, and tack during drying; while higher molecular weight film forming polymers tend to be brittle and delaminate.
Thus, there exists a need for a tire dressing composition that is sufficiently viscous to be applied as a paste and has durability against weather and detergent. There also exists a need for a process to apply such a composition to provide a high gloss protective dressing coating to a tire surface.